By 2050 the United Nations (UN) predicts a world population of 9.7 billion compared with 8 billion in 2022. Increases in food and energy production and the supply of fresh water will be needed to sustain this population, whilst reducing greenhouse gas emissions to limit global warming. The average global temperature is likely to be 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above that in pre-industrial times, unless there is a greater sense of urgency following the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glas...

This edited book provides an all-inclusive coverage of latest research in crop improvement and stress management in potato crop. It is composed of 17 chapters covering breeding, diseases & pest management with the view to enhancing the total production and quality under the scenario of climate change. The book also explores harvesting, storage, post-harvest management, and processing of potato. The book has special focus on the use of high throughput next generation sequencing (NGS) techni...

The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the world’s fourth most important food crop after maize, rice and wheat with 377 million tonnes fresh-weight of tubers produced in 2016 from 19.2 million hectares of land, in 163 countries, giving a global average yield of 19.6 t ha-1 (http://faostat.fao.org). About 62% of production (234 million tonnes) was in Asia (191), Africa (25) and Latin America (18) as a result of steady increases in recent years, particularly in China and India. As a majo...

This book aims to help plant breeders by reviewing past achievements, currently successful practices, and emerging methods and techniques. Theoretical considerations are also presented to strike the right balance between being as simple as possible but as complex as necessary.The United Nations predicts that the global human population will continue rising to 9.0 billion by 2050. World food production will need to increase between 70-100 per cent in just 40 years. First generation ...

The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an environment-friendly method of pest control that integrates well into area-wide integrated pest management (AW-IPM) programmes. This book takes a generic, thematic, comprehensive, and global approach in describing the principles and practice of the SIT. The strengths and weaknesses, and successes and failures, of the SIT are evaluated openly and fairly from a scientific perspective. The SIT is applicable to some major pests of plant-, animal-, and h...

Integrated Pest Management: Current Concepts and Ecological Perspective presents an overview of alternative measures to traditional pest management practices using biological control and biotechnology. The removal of some highly effective broad-spectrum chemicals, caused by concerns over environmental health and public safety, has resulted in the development of alternative, reduced risk crop protection products. These products, less toxic to the environment and easily integrated into biolo...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.By 2050, human population is expected to reach 9.7 billion. The demand for increased food production needs to be met from ever reducing resources of land, water and other environmental constraints. Rice remains the staple food source for a majority of the global populations, but especially in Asia where ninety percent of rice is grown and consumed. Climate change continues to impose abiotic and biotic stresses that curtail rice qua...

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This book provides a fresh, updated and science-based perspective on the current status and prospects of the diverse array of topics related to the potato, and was written by distinguished scientists with hands-on global experience in research aspects related to potato. The potato is the third most important global food crop in terms of consumption. Being the only vegetatively propagated species among the world’s main five staple c...

This book is the first comprehensive compilation of deliberations on botany, medicinal importance, genetic diversity, classical genetics and breeding, in vitro biosynthesis, somatic embryogenesis, genetic transformation, molecular mapping, genome sequence, and functional genomics of Catharanthus roseus. Catharanthus is the most important medicinal plant in the world that contains about 130 therapeutic alkaloids out of which vinblastine and vincristine are the two...

The survival of plants on our planet is nothing short of miraculous. They are virtually stationary packages of food, providing sustenance for a vast array of organisms, ranging from bacteria and fungi, through to insects, and even other plants. But plants are master survivors, having coped with changing environments and evolving predators over much of the history of life on earth. They have surveillance systems and defences that would put most modern armies to shame. They need to have a fo...

This unique book covers the molecular aspects of plant stress and the various industrial applications. Chapters cover many important topics in the biology of plant stress, including morphological and physiological changes of plants due to accumulation of pollutants; the types of stress for enhanced biofuel production from plant biomass; plant adaptation due to different types of environmental stresses; potential applications of microRNAs to improve abiotic stress tolerance in plants; plant...

While there has been great progress in the development of plant breeding over the last decade, the selection of suitable plants for human consumption began over 13,000 years ago. Since the Neolithic era, the cultivation of plants has progressed in Asia Minor, Asia, Europe, and ancient America, each specific to the locally wild plants as well as the ecological and social conditions.A handy reference for knowing our past, understanding the present, and creating the future, this book ...